Re: Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to Miguel and all on the board

I just wonder, because Miguel haven´t deleted spam threads from this board for many weeks now. In the past, he removed those within some days. Hope he is well.

Miguel has a busy life (don't we all?) so I'm not surprised if he's having a bit of a rest in January. I think the reason the traffic here is light is because there isn't much esxDOS related development going on. Which is a shame. You can do great things with it, but most users never use the OS at all. All they want is an LFN file browser. I've been working on some apps for the Chloe, all of which make extensive use of the file system. They use the esxDOS 0.8.5 API and the source code is available (zx.itch.io). But they won't run on the Spectrum. I'm enjoying programming the Chloe (it's a bit more complex so it's a bit more challenging). The only Spectrum program I have any interest in working on is my game for the ZXodus][Engine.

Re: Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to Miguel and all on the board

aowen wrote:

I think the reason the traffic here is light is because there isn't much esxDOS related development going on. Which is a shame. You can do great things with it, but most users never use the OS at all. All they want is an LFN file browser.

At the moment I´m seeing most stuff for esxDOS is coming from SpecNext- and ZXUNO-developers for doing additional .DOT-commands. And esxDOS itself seems to be complete for most users, I think.

LFN is something most people miss. But in reality, we can live without it.Your writing about LFN let me think over doing a program which can search for a given string in the LFN-FAT and can list the entries in a File-Selector. On selecting an entry from the list, this can show/return the SFN-filename and SFN-path of it. It´s in question about esxDOS should do the LFN-support or the program itself...

Re: Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to Miguel and all on the board

Luzie wrote:

esxDOS itself seems to be complete for most users, I think.

It's still missing quite a lot of stuff you need for doing serious programming using the native file system. But then most people don't do any of that. If they do any programming at all the tend to use .TAP files. On the Chloe there are no dot commands and there are no virtual tapes.

LFN is something most people miss. But in reality, we can live without it.

On the Chloe, I abstract what the user types away from the underlying file system. So you can enter: RUN "Jet Set Willy" and that will get converted into RUN "JET_SET_.WIL" (the name of the app folder). Also, folders are considered to have names up to 11 characters with no extension. So you can create slightly more meaningful names to show up when you use the FILES command. For example, MKDIR "Manic Miner" will create a folder called "MANIC_MI.NER", but it will display as "MANIC MINER".

Your writing about LFN let me think over doing a program which can search for a given string in the LFN-FAT and can list the entries in a File-Selector. On selecting an entry from the list, this can show/return the SFN-filename and SFN-path of it. It´s in question about esxDOS should do the LFN-support or the program itself.

It will eventually, but the trouble is that the directory listings soon become massive. In SE Basic IV, I don't even bother sorting the files into alphabetical order for the FILES command because it would be so slow. However, I do list folders first.